MandrakeSoft just released the first beta of Mandrake Linux 9.2. Download the three ISOs from here for now, until more mirrors get updated with the ISOs.
Mandrake Linux 9.2 Beta-1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’m in love with Mandrake. Love it’s URPMI package management, and Drake tools. Love the great folks at the MandrakeClub for the help they provide along with the Contrib section of RPMs and Tex’s rpms as well. Of course this is not to say that they do not need to improve on certian things but they are getting closer and closer to a great desktop then ever before. Not to mention the fact that you can now get MDK pre-loaded from Hp and a few other smaller companies as well.
Got any change log?
Nope. Not yet.
Hmmm, I’m rather worried to say that this is the first time I haven’t been terribly excited by a new Linux distro release. This is nothing against Mandrake: all of the current distros from the “big guys” are excellent; it’s just that there haven’t been any major advances in the big system components in the last few months.
Whilst the core pieces of a modern Linux system seem to have matured and stabilised, no-one seems to be working on fixing the fundamental problems that hold back desktop Linux (we all know what they are). We seem to be just fine tuning what we have, rather than moving up to the next level in terms of package management, standardisation and all the rest.
I say this as a dedicated Linux power user – I nearly switched to Mandrake 9.1, but then discovered Gentoo.
Can imagine why you arent that intrested…but to me these advances are more on a perfection route then to make great advancements…Perfection, how sweet isnt that…;)
btw I currently use gentoo…but only the filemanager not the distro…and its perfect…Mandrake is my melody after passing through redhat, debian, suse, gentoo…and flipping between them back and forth…Mandrake is still the best distro in my opinion!
Waiting for a review, Eugenia
for release onhtes, to do list and more information.
view:
http://www.iexbeta.com/comments.php?catid=1&id=1302
I tend to agree with Alastair. Why is there a new version in the works? What major packages have significantly new versions since 9.1? Are they releasing 9.2 because of a release schedule, rather than any particular need for a new version?
I’m using 9.1 at the moment, but I probably won’t be upgrading just yet.
In terms of package management, urpmi is pretty good, I’ve found. I’ve got great hopes for autopackage as a long term solution.
Hope some mirrors pop-up soon. Can’t get through!
But that could’ve been my own fault…
Call it 9.1.1 instead of 9.2 if you wish. The fact that there are no major revisions of the core packages is already reflected in using 9.x scheme instead of 10.x. One can use a stable mandrake version for a change and this is the first candidate since 7.x times. (disclaimer: I haven’t used 9.1 myself but recon it is much more stable than the versions the painful series of 8.0 to 9.0 — all of which I have used)
..all the major distros seem to release in April and October.
Also the frequent release method is one of OSS’s strengths. Everything is always improving. Although one can also argue that new bugs are always being introduced also of course.
Not that commercial software can’t release in a similar fashion, i.e. little and often. Seemingly they just choose not to.
reading my post before clicking submit would have worked too. sorry about the last post.
Well, to be fair, 9.2 looks like a good stabilisation release, with Samba changes, bugfixes, security updates, more stable Gnome and KDE 3.1.2, stabilised kernel and improved package management and tools. It also includes more improvements to elements such as k3b, Kopete and other user apps, which are perhaps more the focus of this release.
It’ll be nice to have a good solid release before 2.6 and KDE 3.2 later in the year, which justifies a new major numbered release
I think I would have better liked a service pack for 9.1 than a 9.2 release…. Something like a major bug fix/ minor change request release + updates to most popular apps.
Since it’s more of an evolution than a revolution, I hope upgrade routines will be as polished as possible. I usually do clean installs but I can think of better ways to use my time…
I hope we will see the results of the engineering focus the CEO was talking about in the recent PR release.
‘I would have better liked a service pack’
Hello there, this is NOT windows.
Fixes are installed through mandrake update.
Besides, this is a BETA release, so you cant review it.
Good for Mandrake!
> I tend to agree with Alastair. Why is there a new version in
> the works? What major packages have significantly new
> versions since 9.1? Are they releasing 9.2 because of a
> release schedule, rather than any particular need for a
> new version?
I can probably think of a whole bunch of things that could be improved. I love urpmi, but it still required some copy/pasting to get it to work. For most of the people it would be nice to have more point ‘n click… How about updated kernel? How about a choice of 2.6? By release date in Sept, 2.6 should be more stable….
Just the improvements in MDK’s internal programs would make it worth it.
I special point. we are not just talking about upgraders, but we are also looking for new users. What do you want new users to do, upload a less good one, then install a patch???
> Hope some mirrors pop-up soon. Can’t get through!
Just keep clicking… I’m Downloading now….
> (disclaimer: I haven’t used 9.1 myself but recon it is
> much more stable than the versions the painful series of
> 8.0 to 9.0
I have found that 9.0 was the most stable for me, but I like some of the features in 9.1…
I hope that they incluse OpenOffice RC 1.1. It is wonderfull!
And what the heck, the way I run now is, I d/l the free version and use my paid Mandrake Club account to tweak it the way I want… Not as if I have to pay $99 for a updated version… (M$ 98,ME,XP) And with M$ Longhorn you will have to throw ALL of your investment in programs away! Hundreds if not thousands of $$$$…
> I nearly switched to Mandrake 9.1, but then discovered
> Gentoo.
But for most users who don’t make their computers their life, MDK will be the way…
CD 1 is almost downloaded…. On to 2….
MarkP
> I hope that they incluse OpenOffice RC 1.1. It is wonderfull!
It is highly unlikely, afterall OpenOffice 1.1 hasn’t been released yet so it it still unstable. But knowing Mandrakesoft (using a patched kernel in 9.1), they just could.
We’ve just passed a major round of system upheavels:
– GTK2
– GNOME2
– fontconfig/XFT
– artwork redesigns
At the moment, things are settling down a bit, and stuff is just generally making good progress. The new stuff in GNOME 2.4 is pretty cool for instance, I’m sure the same is true of KDE 3.2
At some point in the next 12 months, we’re going to have some more major changes, like Kernel 2.6.
Just remember how fast things are moving! Linux on the desktop is going way too fast for anybody but enthusiasts and developers to really keep up at the moment anyway. Hold tight!
What’s wrong with a patched kernel? There are two ways to get machine code into a program file: you can rewrite the source and recompile/reassemble/relink, or you can spot-target the bugs and patch in the correct machine code.
Borland used to use “patched” programs all the time. The end result is what counts. Now, if the patches themselves had bugs … well, you might have a point.
Incidentally, I’m still using 9.0 and have had no major problems with it, certainly no show-stoppers. I absolutely love it.
If we’re talking “patches,” let’s don’t ignore the ones that Microsoft might apply to programs under Windows 95/98 as they were being loaded for execution. (Not sure if they still do it under ME, 2000 and/or XP.)
We had a ball exploring that one in the old Dr. Dobbs forum on Compuserve quite a few years back.
Microsoft also patched Quarterdeck’s memory-management stuff so that Windows could switch to protected mode.
And in your VxD, there were several calls that Microsoft would patch, changing your own code, after the first call. Made self-integrity checking rather difficult …
Heh. Ah, the things you learn when you have too much time to waste . . … . .. .. [g]
Mandrake definitely is the best distro. However I liked their package management system better in 8.x. In 9.x, there’s 2 separate programs for installing and uninstalling packages. What is up with that? Why didn’t they make it all in one like in 8.x?
OpenOffice is decent, it has some bugs which I’ve encountered in 1.0, and they could definitely do something about the look…perhaps go GTK2? The current widgets and stuff look like absolute crap…what are they using for that?
> What’s wrong with a patched kernel? There are two ways to get
> machine code into a program file: you can rewrite the source and
> recompile/reassemble/relink, or you can spot-target the bugs and
> patch in the correct machine code.
You’ve obviously misunderstood me, due only to my poor explanation. In other words, MandrakeSoft used a pre-release kernel snapshot.
So you see, I didn’t mean that they used a kernel with patches like RedHat, SuSE, Debian or any other distro may provide. I meant that they used a kernel from the 2.4 series development tree and patched that rather than doing the more common deed of taking an actual release like 2.4.20 (the stable version at the time) and creating a patch for a backported NPTL (RedHat), testing the life out of it and finding bugs/security issues and creating a patch (Debian) or making whatever kind of changes SuSE are known for.
On the other hand, they could provide a vanilla kernel common in distros like Gentoo (well, gentoo has an option for this) and LFS.
An excerpt from http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3131
———————————
Why the kernel 2.4.21-pre+Mdk patches was chosen instead of the (“stable”) 2.4.20?
Gaël Duval: Because we need the best kernel possible in Mandrake, and our 2.4.21-pre+ MDK patches (and others) is the best we can provide.
———————————
So you see, I didn’t mean that they used a kernel with patches like RedHat, SuSE, Debian or any other distro may provide. I meant that they used a kernel from the 2.4 series development tree and patched that rather than doing the more common deed of taking an actual release like 2.4.20 (the stable version at the time) and creating a patch for a backported NPTL (RedHat), testing the life out of it and finding bugs/security issues and creating a patch (Debian) or making whatever kind of changes SuSE are known for.
Either way, you’re using a kernel that’s really only been through internal testing. (With the exception of the “vanilla” kernels)
Interestingly, I’ve found Mandrake to be more stable than Red Hat in their latest versions (Red Hat 9 locked up when my laptop went into suspend, forcing a hard reset, and then single-handedly toasted my ext3 partition upon reboot. I’ve had no such problem with Mandrake 9.1 and I’ve been running that daily for several months now, even putting it into suspend on occasion, of course to be fair, this could be a flaw in ext3, as I switched to ReiserFS when I switched to Mandrake)
I find recent versions of Mandrake to strike a nice balance between ease of use and poweruser, and is reasonably stable for getting actual work done.
On my computer, Mandrake seems to be the slowest of them all even with DMA and all the other stuff on. I don’t suppose that it will get any faster either. Knoppix on my computer runs faster. This isn’t a flame it just seems to be the truth in my case.
Its only minor version release not a major. When something major comes out like Kernel 2.6 then the next Mandrake release probably be 10.0.
On my computer, Mandrake seems to be the slowest of them all even with DMA and all the other stuff on. I don’t suppose that it will get any faster either.
So you’ve tried all the other Linux distros?
But yes I have to admit that Mandrake is one of the slower distros I’ve used. Nothing’s as fast as slack
What filesystem are you using? If you’re using ext3 that could be one of your problems. From personal experience I’ve found ReiserFS to be significantly faster.
http://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake-iso/i58…
Well, I’d like to them to include a media integrity check, ala RH, and to be able to retry packages that don’t install the first time during installation(I’ve had 9.1 not install properly on older hardware). And perhaps the ablility to install packages from online, if there is a cd error.
And of course, any speedups in boot time would be nice, especially for home users.
It’s slower than SuSE and Conectiva, but it’s faster than Red Hat (8 and 9).
Our aplication Server is running Mandrake 9.1 and it’s faster enough to do our job.
Hopely now will detect my sound card like RH 9 does.
Saw a couple of comments from people who tried multiple dustributions and versions – now this may sound like a shameless Debian ad, but if you don’t exactly ENJOY trying new versions – don’t think that reformatting and rebooting from CD is fun and wasting HOURS getting your new and shiny BlueHat 15.4 installed with that is means of trying to figure out what has been changed, then give Debian a spin.
Seriously speaking. I have a couple of machines at home ALL running Debian. And they have had a clean install ONCE each. All upgrades and systems changes can then be handled without rebooting (unless you are talking kernel upgrades obviously) and for the sake of personal desktop machines, the current version is completely irrelevant. If you want the latest software, apt-get and friends will take care of that.
Some of the bad points typically mentioned about Debian:
1) Installation is difficult.
Well, it is not more difficult than installing Windows. It doesn’t look pretty, but it works. And it requires you know a little about what is going on. Complete newbies and your old aunt doesn’t install Windows either themselves, so why should they be able to install Linux? It is not a priority to them.
2) The software is outdated
If you stick to stable – yes it is. In order to be stable is must not change. But there is nothing I cannot get if I just run testing (or unstable). So what is the problem?
3) It is difficult to configure
In my opinion is easier to configure to do exactly what you want instead of some of the GUI tools. And if you have more than one machine to do it on, then your GUI’s are typically worth jack sh** anyway…
So I guess the bottom line is: If you know what you are doing, then Debian is your best shot. Some people will say Gentoo is quite similar in that respect, but frankly I have better things to do than spend a weekend waiting for Gentoo to compile KDE…
If it do not detect, U can go to bugzilla and report a bug, then when the final version come out it will detect your sound card.
On the subject of Debian…
1) Installation is difficult.
Well, it is not more difficult than installing Windows. It doesn’t look pretty, but it works. And it requires you know a little about what is going on. Complete newbies and your old aunt doesn’t install Windows either themselves, so why should they be able to install Linux? It is not a priority to them.
When was the last time you installed Windows? So you’re saying that under Debian, all I have to do is insert the CD, press I believe it’s F8, maybe enter a couple of times, and then click next, next, next under the graphical portion of installation?
2) The software is outdated
If you stick to stable – yes it is. In order to be stable is must not change. But there is nothing I cannot get if I just run testing (or unstable). So what is the problem?
Yes, I’d love to trust my data to something that’s barely tested and called “unstable.” I can just imagine it now…
Me: Hey boss, I’m gonna go install Linux on my machine.
Boss: Linux, eh?
Me: Yup…Debian UNSTABLE
Boss: UNSTABLE? *STEAM COMES OUT OF EARS*
3) It is difficult to configure
In my opinion is easier to configure to do exactly what you want instead of some of the GUI tools. And if you have more than one machine to do it on, then your GUI’s are typically worth jack sh** anyway…
And what prevents you from editing the config files by hand in Mandrake or Red Hat? At least they give you an option of “the easy way” if you need and/or want that sort of thing.
So I guess the bottom line is: If you know what you are doing, then Debian is your best shot. Some people will say Gentoo is quite similar in that respect, but frankly I have better things to do than spend a weekend waiting for Gentoo to compile KDE…
I know what I’m doing too, but personally, I’d like to have a recent version of software right out of the box. I don’t hate Debian, I just don’t think it’s useful to me or to most people in stock form. It’s just too difficult to setup and configure. I have to admit that I do love Knoppix, but that’s because it fixes Debians major flaws. Auto hardware detection and recent versions of software out of the box are a must for me.
In addition, many of us are still on dialup connections, like myself. I have all I can do to keep up with security updates on my boxen, much less download a recent version of KDE, OpenOffice, and Mozilla.
I seem to remember in one of the earlier versions of Mandrake, you could update your installation without rebooting (i.e. it’d run the installer under your current installation). However it was rather buggy.
I’m hoping they’ve improved that. I just want package updates, this kernel is plenty stable for me (running mdk 9.1). I want to be able to stick the CDROM in the drive, fire up konqueror and click “setup.sh” and have it go through and upgrade my system whilst I continue browsing the web, listening to music, etc.
The reason I don’t use debian is I cannot download that much stuff over 56k modem with a 400MB download limit. Being able to have cd’s to update your OS every 6 months is a good thing for people like me (I upgraded 9.0 to 9.1 and it worked fine; I wont do another “clean” installation until 10.0).
> 2) The software is outdated
> If you stick to stable – yes it is. In order to be stable is must not
> change. But there is nothing I cannot get if I just run testing (or
> unstable). So what is the problem?
Unstable is not an option for me. I have an always on router with a high speed link (512kpbs) that is a sitting duck if it doesn’t have the latest security patches as it runs squid, mysql and apache. Debian unstable and testing do not offer security updates, leaving stable as the only option.
My only gripe with stable is that the software is soo old. Not just 6 months out of date but like YEARS. On my server this doesn’t matter to the same extent but my desktop needs XF86 4.3 or greater and kernel 2.4 or greater (USB, Firewire).
Besides, do you really want to run something called “unstable” on a production server or workstation for day to day use? Not me anyway
“If you stick to stable – yes it is. In order to be stable is must not change. But there is nothing I cannot get if I just run testing (or unstable). So what is the problem?”
My problem with it is right there in the name, unstable. I’ve been using it for about two or three months now and have had no major problems, but I always have a little twinge of nervousness when I do a dist-upgrade. If someone buys a mandrake release, there would be a promise that nothing was going to ship broken, and that it would be quickly fixed if it were.
Another nice thing about Mandrake is that they make kernel upgrades extreamly easy. To get the low latency patched kernel for 9.1 for example, it’s as simple as firing up rpmdrake and picking it. As far as I know, to get supermount and support for my zip drive I’m going to have to sit down and configure then compile the thing myself in debian.
As far as configuration, personally I think most people are looking for gui tools. If you know where a particular configuration file is and exactly what to change, I agree that it is easier to change it through a text editor. But I also think the average user, and I include myself in this catagory, would rather sacrifice a few extra seconds for a configuration tool to fire up rather than learn where the option we’re looking for is located. Mandrake’s really done a pretty nice job with a lot of their utilities. Though I have to agree with a previous poster about rpmdrake’s seperation of add and remove program. Getting that ease of use back with synaptic in Debian has been one of my favorite things in switching over. I can install a program, then uninstall it from the same interface if after trying I don’t like it. What a concept!
I really like Debian, but I think distros like Mandrake have an important place.
Debian unstable is simply the latest version of any software release. Other distros don’t make this distinction, including simply the latest version, or UNSTABLE. Please go to http://www.debian.org to find out the differences in release levels.
In addition, there are several good Debian distros that are very good (Libranet being my favorite) and easy to use.
“Please go to http://www.debian.org to find out the differences in release levels.”
OK. “Packages in unstable are the least tested and may contain problems severe enough to affect the stability of your system.”
Which I think is the difference betwean, say a Mandrake release and a Debian Unstable release if they had an equivelent package, testing. The X packages were broken for a while last month in unstable. They were quickly fixed, but if I have a boxed set I at least know that they’d have checked to make sure startx worked before shipping. Or a more recent, but far less severe problem, Geramik broke for a few days. Mandrake would have just shipped the latest ‘working’ version rather than the most current version that had proved unstable.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting down Debian Unstable. But I think a ‘lot’ more testing goes into any Mandrake release, simply because they have the time to freeze packages and release betas and RCs once that happens. I think a better comparison would be betwean Unstable and a mandrake system updating from cooker.
Mandrake seems to follow the .0, .1 and .2 for all of their releases, so probably for mid-april 2004 there will be a Mandrake 10 (probably will be called ManX by marketing guys), by then it might be using kernel 2.6 (if there is lack of driver modules probably as a Experimental or Alternative kernel, ala XFree 3.3/4.3).
About 9.2, KDE 3.2 is scheduled for the end of the year (late november) so I expect only GNOME will receive a major upgrade, and probably xFCE (I’m KDE user, so I don’t know much about other WMs).
As many people said, Package management needs some work done, as it is strange to have 4 different application to do a single task (manage packages); at worst I would’ve expected a single application with 4 tabs (ala Windows). RedHat Management is nice and very easy to use, but it lacks some features to manage arbitrary packages.
The Boot Theme idea is good, but I never found additional themes, may be 9.2 will have some. BTW, wouldn’t it be more user friendly to show all boot messages only if user requested? I mean, once everything is working, I don’t find much use for this messages.
After all I would expect 9.2 to be a more Win98/WinME change (without the bugs
) than a Win3.1/WinXP; which I found is good; because it would be less probable to introduce serious bugs, and in general it would be a more refined version. To tell the truth, I hope ManX (sorry, just guessin’ name) will be more revolutionary, as it will be the base for the Man10 series, which will have to face MacOSX Panther and later by 10.1/10.2 will face Longhorn Man10 series will be focused probably on eyecandy and simplify user experience more than anything else. However this change should be a lot more aggresive than 8.0/9.0 change. It is nice to forecast, it is good to exercise your imagination 
Some notes on personal experience
Since kernel 2.6 will allow copying from IDE drives, may be this is a little out of place, but why Mandrake sets my CDROM as IDE and my CDWRITER as SCSI, if that configuration w’ont allow to do CD/CD copy in K3B, I always need to add the hdc=ide-scsi and change fstab so both CDROMs are scsi. I mean, since it is almost the same, isn’t it better to just install every CDROM as SCSI? (now I feel some relief)
DVC325 is probably one the most used Kodak webcams, and finally there is a project in Sourceforge doing a driver for it (shame on Kodak for no delivering even the documentation to do it). I hope Mandrake would add this module so everything is detected (well my Scanport 3000 is an unsupported Scanner, but may be asking for more than 1 module per release is too much).
Question
btw does anyone knows why no matter how many times I check “Keep password” when I need to execut an application as root, it never saves it and ALWAYS ask for it?? I think I like the RH way to manage priviliges (the small systray key)
Just because it’s labeled “unstable” doesn’t mean it’s any less stable than, say, RedHat 9.0. I’ve had Redhat x.0 releases frequently be unstable for me, for instance. Just because Debian is more truthful about it’s stability level doesn’t mean the unstable branch is worse than the latest release from other distributions.
Question
btw does anyone knows why no matter how many times I check “Keep password” when I need to execut an application as root, it never saves it and ALWAYS ask for it?? I think I like the RH way to manage priviliges (the small systray key)
I actually think this is more of Gnome/KDE thing then a RH/MDK thing (although I may be completly wrong as I haven’t used KDE in RH for awhile now). If you fire up Gnome in MDK and get asked for root priv. it too will put a little key in the notifacation area, while KDE doesn’t.
Forgive me, I update my Linux box every week and I’ve never used Mandrake before. So Mandrake releases a new version, how does that translate into a newer box for previous Mandrake users? Or does it even affect them.
I ask this silly question because I use a Linux distribution for which a release of a new CD version for the distribution is irrelevant to old users. Since their system, more often than not, is even more updated than the release CD or new version CD is.
I find it strange that users have to install newer versions of a distribution CD to keep their system up to date and bug free. I always thought the new releases were for new users as opposed to old users. *shrugs*
I need to try out these things one of these days.
Mystilleef
Im just glad they didn’t called it MDK 10.0. I mean, neither this or the RH Beta deserves a full number jump, and Mandrake seems to be the only big company not hopping on the number inflation bandwagon.
Thank you.
[Please allow me to preface by saying that I’m a long-time Debian user who is slowly regaining some of the “ooh” panache of exploring “other” distros.]
bytes256 wrote: I don’t hate Debian, I just don’t think it’s useful to me or to most people in stock form. It’s just too difficult to setup and configure.
I have to agree — I don’t think Debian is targeted to “most people.” There’s a certain odd mentality (aura?) that surrounds Debian, and it’s self-motivating. Most users will actually be more comfortable with a non-[vanilla]Debian distro. Knoppix is one great example; Libranet is another.
Rambus wrote: …so I expect only GNOME will receive a major upgrade, and probably xFCE…
As an ardent XFce4 proponent, I can’t skip this opportunity to say that 4.0-RC2 is out, and 4.0-final is scheduled for proper release in 4 days. It’s awesome!
There are Mandrake 9.1 RPMS posted in the link at http://varmint.moongroup.com/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2003-July/006874.h…
Rambus later wrote: Since kernel 2.6 will allow copying from IDE drives, may be this is a little out of place, but why Mandrake sets my CDROM as IDE and my CDWRITER as SCSI, if that configuration w’ont allow to do CD/CD copy in K3B, I always need to add the hdc=ide-scsi and change fstab so both CDROMs are scsi. I mean, since it is almost the same, isn’t it better to just install every CDROM as SCSI?
I’m not sure why Mandrake’s configuration tools do that precisely, but I must mention that 2.6, being nearly in its infancy, still has quite a few bugs regarding both direct ATAPI burning (via cdrecord’s dev=ATAPI:/dev/hdX) and ide-scsi. On a SMP machine with both Plextor SCSI hardware and Yamaha ATAPI hardware, attempting either flavor of burning under 2.6 results in an instant, unrecoverable (short of a hard power-cycle) freeze. I suspect Mandrake does what you refer to on the basis of caution.
This post has nothing to do with Mandrake. But I just discovered Bonzai Linux. From preliminary analysis, it is basically an up-to date Debian that has some pretty good default installs and allows me to apt-get everything else. Finally, it seems that I found a Debian-based distro that doesn’t deviate much from Debian so that Debian packages are extremely compatible and one that is mostly up to date so that I can get a working system relatively quick.
“I can probably think of a whole bunch of things that could be improved. I love urpmi, but it still required some copy/pasting to get it to work. For most of the people it would be nice to have more point ‘n click… ”
Oh come on this is nit-picking ! Since when is copy and pasting such a big chore ? Also there are really only two legit official sources that MDK endorses. Those are their update source and their comcercial source which requires a password from your MDKClub membership to access. Anyways the way they implamented urpmi is great IMHO. It leaves it up for you to include your own sources not so official sources and in some-cases not so legal ( aka PLF ) sources.
http://torrents.nexornet.com/torrents/MandrakeLinux-9.2beta1-CD1.i5… (15 seeds and 12 leechers right now)
http://torrents.nexornet.com/torrents/MandrakeLinux-9.2beta1-CD2.i5… (1 seed and 1 leecher)
http://torrents.nexornet.com/torrents/MandrakeLinux-9.2beta1-CD3.i5… (1 seed and 2 leechers)
Dunno how long the original seeder for CD 2 and 3 will keep BT open, though.
“The Boot Theme idea is good, but I never found additional themes, may be 9.2 will have some.”
I would not mind some extra themes either.
“BTW, wouldn’t it be more user friendly to show all boot messages only if user requested? I mean, once everything is working, I don’t find much use for this messages.”
A option to not have it show messages is nice but for those who do not want to see the boot messages. Yet IMHO I like having a look at the boot messages as it provides a nice way of trouble-shooting and monitoring your system to make sure everything is working ok.
Speaking of Booting…when are they going to start offering a graphical grub? and why is LILO still the default in 9.1?
I wouldn’t use ReiserFS with 9.1. I’ve experienced some crashes(other issues) and some config files were overwritten by ReiserFS. I now use XFS and it’s fine.
Im just glad they didn’t called it MDK 10.0. I mean, neither this or the RH Beta deserves a full number jump, and Mandrake seems to be the only big company not hopping on the number inflation bandwagon.
Ok, I am getting tired of hearing this statement. I don’t want to be rude, but the Redhat versioning had nothing to do with marketing. The major release number (ie 7,8,9) is based on binary compatability. When binary compatability is broken between releases, a major release number is changed to indicate the change. A minor release number is changed when the release just contains bugfixes, program updates, and such.
If it was all a marketing gimmick, there is no way that Redhat Enterprise server products would be at version 2.1 – they would jump those up to be current.
Thank You
What binary compatability is lost? You can still install RH 7.x RPMs in 9. Ive done it plenty. I believe 8 and 9 even used the same GCC/Glib version. So I think you are mistaken.
If it has an upgrade to a major library (glibc), major internal kernel changes, or a compiler which isn’t backwards compatible with the old RedHat version, they bump the major number instead of the minor. It’s normally some sort of major binary compatibility upgrade.
RedHat 9 included the new kernel threads, with glibc that supports it. it has a new compiler, and the new glibc.
Some binaries will still run, but not all, hence the major release number update
Firstly, please find your way to the Mandrake Cooker Wiki at http://qa.madnrakesoft.com/wiki, where you may be able to track developments a bit better than in bugzilla.
There were some questions about what has changed, so here goes:
-GCC 3.3.1
-Minor fixes in the kernel, as well as 2.4.21 final
-SASL1->SASL2 migration, and we now ship Openldap-2.1 instead of 2.0 (these changes may seem trivial, but are not, since it involves rebuilding a lot of packages against updated libraries). Some work has been done on cyrus-imapd (in contribs), and we hope to have everything necessary for kolab and opengroupware working out-the-box.
-Samba3 is ready to replace samba-2.2.x if 3.0.0 final is released in time to test all features. If not, you can install samba3 alongside samba-2.2.x, or just have samba3 if you want (though it will be in contrib).
-Handling of requirements on rpm packages has been reworked, development packages now know on their own what other development packages they need. This allows easier rebuilding of packages and less manual package legwork. For developers, it will mean never seeing “-lXXX not found” where XXX is a library you don’t care about, required by a library you *do* care about, since the library you care abou t will now have a Requires: devel(libXXX) automatically added.
-The Mandrake tools have been updated, and should now be more GNOME HIG-compliant, and should use stock icons in most places. The last of the GTK1->GTK2 port work has mostly been finished (such as userdrake). The network configuration support has been improved.
-urpmi has seen lots of improvements and enhancements, such as package transactions (ie instead of downloading all packages, then installing, it downloads them in groups) and graceful recovery (ie it won’t fail if one package is missing, but will install all the packages it can without it).
For the Debian apt-getters, please note that Mandrake can be hot-upgraded, just like Debian. I have done a number of upgrades using ‘urpmi.addmedia;urpmi urpmi;urpmi –auto-select –auto;urpmi kernel;reboot’. In the past, you had to have enough disk space on /var/ for all the packages if you were doing this over the network, but for upgrading to 9.2 this will not be necessary (due to the transcation support). You *don’t* have to install any Mandrake box more than once if you don’t want to (the Debian users *keep* claining it’s only Debian that has this feature!). And of course, Mandrake ships with latest *stable* releases, whereas Debian forces you to sometimes choose between ancient, bleeding-edge, and 3rd-party (ie samba-2.2.3a, samba-3.0.0alpha/beta or from some arb sources list).
For other feature requests/bug reports (ie ide-scsi for CD-ROM when you have a CD-RW, or the password box not remembering your password), please file a bug in bugzilla (but search first to ensure it has not been filed already)
I have done some screenshots of the default look of MDK9.2beta1
http://members.lycos.co.uk/norba/mdk9.2beta1/index.htm
Have a lot of fun
>For the Debian apt-getters, please note that Mandrake can be hot-upgraded, just like Debian. I have done a number of upgrades using ‘urpmi.addmedia;urpmi urpmi;urpmi –auto-select –auto;urpmi kernel;reboot’.
Is it also possible to hot-upgrade to this beta from 9.1? If so, could you post what commands I need to enter to do this? Thanks a lot in advance.
> Is it also possible to hot-upgrade to this beta from 9.1? If > so, could you post what commands I need to enter to do this? > Thanks a lot in advance.
You can only upgrade to the beta from 9.1 if you downloaded the ISOs. In this case, place the first CD in your cdrom drive, and run:
# urpmi.addmedia 9.2beta1-cdrom –distrib removable://mnt/cdrom
Then the normal hot-upgrade sequence:
# urpmi urpmi
# urpmi –auto-select –auto
# urpmi kernel
# reboot
If you didn’t download the CDs, but have the bandwidth, go to http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon and configure a cooker (and cooker contrib while you’re at it) source, and then do the usual sequence. Beware, cooker is fluid, so packages may change while you’re upgrading!
But I think Mandrake needs to make its website look better than it currently is. It looks much worse than many personal home pages on the internet. I am sure many packages will generate more professional looking web pages than what they have.
The contrast with Redhat’s website is striking. Redhat’s looks all the part of a professional website, much better looking IMHO than Microsoft’s even. Mandrake needs to be more convincing that it is a professional company
Beeing a newbie Linux enthusiast I resently tested Mandrake 9.1 and like Suse and Knoppix (the other ones I tested) I found the font rendering less than perfect. The fonts appeared fuzzy or out of focus and letterspacing seemed to be a problem. Unchecking anti alias didn´t help as it made the rendering horrible in other ways. I tried installing my truetype fonts from windows but it didn´t help much.
Is there something I can do to fix this? Or is it a universal Linux problem beeing worked on?
OK … all the Distros have an UNSTABLE branch … for Mandrake it’s called cooker … in RedHat it’s called RawHide and in Debian it’s called Sid (or unstable).
For a workstation, most of those can be used without many problems … but obviously on an important server (like the mail server, your primary web server, or your corprate database server) you should use something much more stable.
Debian is not that hard to setup … compared to Arch linux and Gentoo it is very easy …
It really doesn’t matter which Distro you use … if you routinely update the software (with urpmi, apt-get, up2date or whatever) then the software you have now is not what you originally installed anyway.
All the majoe distros are running the same things … mozilla 1.2 to 1.4, evolution 1.2 to 1.4, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 to 1.0.3, gnome 2.0 or 2.2, KDE 3.0 or 3.1, etc….
As for Mandrake Font Rendering … it depends on what programs you are talking about, but I like to add the Vera Bitstream Fonts. You can get them from here:
http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
Then untar them and I copy the entire directory to /usr/share/fonts/ like this (from the directory where you untared the downloaded fonts):
cp -R ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10 /usr/share/fonts
Then you have to copy the file named local.conf (inside the ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10 directory) to the /etc/fonts directory like this:
cd /usr/share/fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10
cp local.conf /etc/fonts
Then you have to run the program fc-cache to find the new files and the local.conf file will switch the default KDE/Gnome Serif Sans-Serif and Mono fonts the the bitstream-vera fonts.
Restart X … normally by restarting the PC, however you can log out and then press Alt-Ctrl-Backspace to restart X if you boot to a GUI mode (without having to reboot the PC)…
After I login, I also open mozilla and go to Edit-Preferences and select Appearance-Fonts and set the minimum font size to 12 … and I then set the SANS, SANS-SERIF and MONO to the Bitstream Vera fonts…
I think it looks MUCH better that way … but that won’t affect any gtk 1.2 programs you have … it will change OpenOffice, Evolution, Mozilla, Terminal and most other newer programs.
Thanks a lot JohnnyH! I´ll try this.
You could also make a directory under /usr/share/fonts called ms-fonts and copy all the .ttf files from your windowsfonts directory into the new /usr/share/fonts/ms-fonts directory and then run fc-cache again … then restart X again and use those fonts in most of your linux programs as well.
I agree, I have been saying this for a long time….and none of there different websites seem to follow the same template or design patterns….just like the rest of everything mandrake creates the whole look and feel of there websites look like they were half-assed and just thrown together
consistency, is one of mandrakes biggest problems in my opinion
yes, I’m still running an outdadted 9.0 cause I never knew that I could just upgrade without reinstalling.
Is it possible to upgrade to cooker a two-version older distro?
Mandrake’s had some weird font issues since 9.1 or so. Mostly in browsers. Text will be displayed wrong untill it’s hightlighted, and be fine after that. Little stuff like letters overlapping or the top half of letters being off center with the bottom half. After the near perfect fonts in Redhat 9 mandrake 9.1 was kind of a let down. Shame, since it’s heads and tails better a desktop distro in all other respects (IMHO).
Mandrake fonts look much better if you download the libfreetype package from http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dchest/xfthack/“>David
go to plf.zarb.org -> easy urpmi config, and replace your old 9.0 contribs; 9.0 main (cdroms); with cooker main; cooker contribs (or 9.1 main; 9.1 contribs)
after that:
urpmi urpmi
etc… etc… see previous posts from ranger
New stuff – the biggest change is behind the scenes, the update to RPM 4.2 with big changes in the way provides and requires are managed. This is only really immediately obvious to an end-user in a couple of cases (mainly to do with saner dependencies). Other than that – substantial polishing on the drak tools (it’s highly recommended to look through the documentation on urpmi and rpmdrake in particular, they do lots of stuff many people don’t know about), GNOME 2.4, some other stuff. One very notable new app – Evolution 1.4. kernel 2.6 in contrib is a possibility, apparently. ifplugd support on wireless has just been implemented, which should be cool. PCMCIA support should be rather better in this release, since it’s using a sane card database (the one in 9.1 was rather old because of an oversight in the packaging).
Updates – to do an update on a running system, try this: setup an urpmi source for the version to which you wish to update, disable other sources, then do urpmi –auto-select -v. This just about works from a clean 9.0 to 9.1, and ought to work between 9.1 and 9.2 when 9.2 comes out. It’s similar to apt’s ability to go from stable to unstable or whatever. Mandrake has an equivalent for Debian sid – that’s exactly what Cooker is. Cooker users do rolling updates like sid users, using –auto-select daily to keep the system up to date.
Versioning – Mandrake versioning isn’t set in stone (it’s not always .0 – .1 – .2 – .0). It’s a decision taken based on the severity of the upgrade. This will almost certainly be .2, as (as has been remarked) there hasn’t been much in the way of structural change since .1. The next probably will be 10.0, because it’ll probably use kernel 2.6 by default, but that’s just coincidence – if there wasn’t much structural change from 9.2 -> next version, that would be 9.3.
MDK 9.2 will ship with freetype 2.1.4 (or later) which incorporates the Chester stuff. It will also include the Bistream Vera fonts (if you get the beta, you might want to grab the fonts-ttf-vera package from Cooker contrib – either define a Cooker source and use urpmi, or just grab it from a Cooker FTP site direct).
the beta 1 installer still uses the 9.1 version boot kernel, so it still has the bugs of the 9.1 installer, particularly regarding Promise RAID controllers. beta 2 should have a new boot kernel which will fix these problems.
>If you didn’t download the CDs, but have the bandwidth, go to http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon and configure a cooker (and cooker contrib while you’re at it) source, and then do the usual sequence. Beware, cooker is fluid, so packages may change while you’re upgrading!
Wow, thanks a lot for that site. I hoped the beta might fix some anoying bugs 9.1 had, but the packages I got through this site for 9.1 did everything for me.